# Writing Characters: 15 Actionable Tips For Writing Deep Character ## Метаданные - **Канал:** The Creative Penn - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtccqltRY8g - **Дата:** 16.03.2026 - **Длительность:** 1:19:02 - **Просмотры:** 700 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/18189 ## Описание What makes a character so compelling that readers will forgive almost anything about the plot? How do you move beyond vague flaws and generic descriptions to create people who feel pulled from real life? In this solo episode, I share 15 actionable tips for writing deep characters, curated from past interviews on the podcast. 00:00 Welcome and Episode Setup 01:14 London Book Fair Highlights 04:41 AI Search and Metadata 09:27 Audio and Global Expansion 11:33 Seven Figure Longevity Marketing 21:32 Simplify Your Author Business 24:04 Listener Photos and Community 26:08 Patreon Sponsor and Extras 27:05 Believe Care Invest Trifecta 30:11 Define the Dramatic Question 33:00 Specific Flaws Build Depth 35:29 Heroine Journey Connection 38:05 Choose Hero or Heroine 38:51 Metaphor Families Voice 41:38 Diagonal Toast Details 45:52 Displace Trauma Into Fiction 48:52 Write Diverse Characters 51:53 Cultural Specificity Research 54:35 Morally Neutral Protagonists 58:42 Vibrant Side Characters 01:01:10 ## Транскрипт ### Welcome and Episode Setup [] Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration, and information on writing, craft, and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint, and lots more at the creativepen. com. And that's pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 854 of the podcast and it is Sunday the 15th of March 2026 as I record this. In today's show I'm sharing a roundup on writing characters 15 actionable tips for writing deep characters with the tips taken from various episodes over the years. So hopefully you will find it useful and interesting because I have so many years of content now and so much deep insight from lots of interviews into many topics. So I would like to do more of this if you find it useful. So that is coming up in the main section of this show and as ever please let me know what you think in the comments. ### London Book Fair Highlights [1:14] So, in writing and publishing and also personal news because it's been an all-encompassing week, I was at London Bookf Fair last week, which is always super interesting and also super intense. And I did pick up a head cold. I tried so hard to avoid handshakes and hugs, but I did get sick as ever. I'm a little under the weather, but it's kind of inevitable with these trade shows and conferences, and it is still worth it for me. So I was there for two days, one fullon day of meetings and sessions and socializing at the fair and then speaking at the Indie Author Lab for the Alliance of Independent Authors. So the London Bookf Fair is a trade show for the publishing industry in a huge series of halls at London Olympia, although it is moving next year to East London's XL, which I think will be really interesting. It is a much funkier area of town, that's for sure. So that will be different. I have put some video and pictures on Instagram @ JFPEN author if you want to see it. So yeah, I think one of the reasons it's so intense, I do say this every year, but it it's we are trained to look at book covers. Like we love book covers. We go to bookstores, we look at book covers. So when you walk around the fair, there are so many books everywhere and you can't help looking at them all. and I end up taking pictures of loads of books that I'm interested in, most of which are either on pre-order for the end of the year or coming out next year or something. But you can't stop your eyes looking at all this stuff. And if you're an introvert, and I don't know if I am a sort of highly sensitive, but I'm certainly I get very overstimulated at the fair. It is noisy. There are backto-back meetings and by the end of a day or two it feels like all my atoms are vibrating at a much faster level. I think if you are an introvert you will understand how that feels and it is super exhausting but still worth it. I had some great meetings, met with lots of different people on lots of different things and also I bumped into some people. I think this is part of what happens at the fair as people come from all over the world and you get to meet people there who you may have interacted with online and not spoken to. So for example, I met with Thad Mroy from Future of Publishing. We've known each other online for years and he's been on this show before. I also bumped into someone I whose conference I spoke at like almost a decade ago precoid for sure. So there are things that happen in the halls, some serendipity that can be interesting. But somebody did ask me how do I get meetings at the book fair? Now of course if you want to meet an agent, I did meet with an agent at the international rights fair you do need to arrange that in advance. But also like any conference, if you go year on year and you build up relationships, then things tend to happen. And it is very unlikely that going to the book fair for one day results in a book deal and a ton of other opportunities. It's more like you have to be proactive year on year and go to things and push yourself out your comfort zone. And I think that in general inerson conferences are all about pushing your comfort zone. So I did go to a panel on ### AI Search and Metadata [4:41] how to survive and thrive in a post search world which was about GEO generative engine optimization and it was a traditional publishing session and that the fair is 99. 9% for traditional publishing. So it really isn't aimed at indie authors. So this was full of publishing people and they were talking about essentially getting found through AI chat GBT and Claude and Gemini and Amazon's Rufus and all these new tools and that's really important to remember AI search is not just chat GBT I mean one of the biggest AI searches is going to be Google's Gemini or just Google AI search and Amazon of course their Rufus has now rolled out in the UK as well people using that to find things. So yeah, I really wanted to hear what they were talking about and hilariously they literally talked about metadata. [gasps] So how they're updating their backlist books with metadata because books that are more than 10 years old pretty much don't have any metadata at all. and that will be keywords, sales description, tagging depending on the system that they're using in order to make books discoverable again and refreshing metadata. So, I found that really interesting that the main discussion was on metadata. Now, in the opening keynote, Penguin RandomHouse CEO Tom Weldon talked about lots of things, and I'll come back to AI in a minute, but he said around indie authors, noting self-publishing serves as a sort of feeder system with more and more successful indie authors striking traditional publishing deals after building their audience. It's sort of exciting how self-publishing has blossomed over the last 10, 15, 20 years. describing the indie author marketplace as a sort of parallel ecosystem and how traditional publishers can scale the audience of successful indies. Weldon conceded that traditional publishers have learned some lessons from the self-publishing community particularly around speed to market in that self-published authors are famous for publishing books quickly to reach voracious readers particularly in genres like romance. So, I found that quite funny. When I first went to the London Book Fair in 2012, there is absolutely no way the CEO of Penguin Random House would have mentioned self-publishing as exciting in any way. So, yeah, I was pleased to hear that. I'll link to all this. Publishing perspectives. com is the best place to find roundups and things of the book fair that are not behind a payw wall. There's lots of things behind pay walls, but publishing perspectives is a good blog. On AI, Weldon said that Penguin Random House has organized around three fundamental principles concerning AI. The company will do everything it can to protect authors intellectual property. The company will champion human creativity. And this is the important thing, the company will innovate responsibly with AI. He said, "It's not that we as publishers and authors are anti- AI. We just want some transparency, consent, and compensation. There's a robust licensing framework. Let's use it. " A lot of repetitive book publishing processes could be replaced, and that would be a good thing. So, I think this is so important. I keep saying you can hold two things in your mind at the same time. You can value human creativity. You can value licensing of our IP and you can also use AI to help you run your business, do your marketing, anything else you want to use it for to help you. So also on Publishers Marketplace, as reported by Jane Freriedman, as this was behind a payw wall, Pan McMillan CEO Joanna Prior said at a keynote elsewhere, AI is no longer a future technology. It is permeating every digital touch point we own. Yet, as an industry, we often seem stuck in a loop, ftting over whether a machine might one day write a book, a prize winner. Intellectual property won't matter if we lose the readers. We must stop obsessing over the machine and start mastering it to serve the reader. And I love that. I wish lots more people would stop obsessing over the machine. Just get on with creating serve the reader. So if you have not even used AI for metadata or repetitive processes, traditional publishing is openly talking about this. So you can draw lines around creativity, but please at least try it for publishing, marketing and businessing business thing. ### Audio and Global Expansion [9:27] Audio was big at the fair as ever and 11 Labs had a big stall next to Audible. And in one talk, Audible CEO Bob Carrian announced plans to launch in 11 new international marketplaces in the coming year, including Belgium and the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, and many more, including Arabicspeaking countries. He said in established marketplaces, the audiobook format is the fastest growing book format, but there are countries around the world where there is a darth of audio books. There's still so much growth around the world that can happen. And definitely something to keep in mind. While English language audio you could say is pretty saturated, more markets are opening up and I know lots of indies focusing on ebooks in translation. So maybe audio books are the next frontier, especially with the expansion of languages in Amazon's own virtual voice within KDP. And I did have a chat with someone from Amazon about the expansion of the translation. And there's definitely a lot of growth in that area around the KDP ebook translation, but also the audio. Spotify emphasized the growth in their audiobook catalog as well as the new audiobook charts for the UK, the page match feature I talked about a few week back, a few weeks back that syncs audio to a print book and the upcoming partnership with bookshop. org for print sales and that's on the spotify. com blog. Now, one interesting statistic. In the UK, more than half, so 52%, only a little over half of audiobook listeners are under age 35, underscoring how we're bringing books to a new demographic. Now, the focus is expanding from audiobooks to all books, designing for a world where readers move between formats throughout the day. So I think that's brilliant because so often we talk about how the book reading audience is kind of growing up and getting older and I think it will obviously depend on genre but great to see that a younger demographic is also listening. ### Seven Figure Longevity Marketing [11:33] So then in other things book has a great article from Willow Winters on book marketing for longevity my sevenfigure author business. So, if you want to have a sevenf figureure business, definitely read this article as it has some really key elements that are important. But I also think it's really great if you are wanting any kind of business as an author. I've had people ask me lately, why can't I make money as an author? And I ask them, so what are you doing? And they are not doing a lot of things that Willow Winters talks about in this article. So I'm recommending this article in general if you feel like I want to make I don't know five figures or four figures let alone six or seven. So yes tactics change but the attitude is so important. So first of all determination and a bias for action and agency. Make a decision go learn how to do something and put it into action. Willow said I started this career as a stay-at-home mom of two who was broke and had lost her identity. I had stories in my head that begged to be written but no background in publishing. I decided to give it a go. Then pivoting in the face of a challenge. She said she saw high volume publishing models and authors and publishers upping ad spend to outbid each other as well as burnout in the community. So she also saw that older books started going viral with the rise of book talk. I had tons of older titles. I knew I could sell on Tik Tok if I got them in front of the audience. I hadn't been able to tap into before. I watched, adjusted, and kept an eye on two things. What readers said they wanted and the bottom line. This is huge. And I actually talked about this. I did a talk at the Indie Author Lab on business for authors. Really, it's simplifying your author business. But this is the baseline of a business. What do readers say they want? As in what are they going to buy? and the bottom line, the money you're actually making because a business has a profit motive. And so many authors want to write what they love for the love of it without thinking about the profit motive. So, and you can write for the love of it. a hobby. I've really been emphasizing this and someone came up to me actually at London Bookf Fair. I can't remember your name. Sorry if you're listening, but said, "I am so grateful for you for giving me permission to make this a hobby because I'm enjoying it so much more and I'm just not having to do all the things. " So, yes, back to the article from Willow, what readers said they wanted and the bottom line. Now, I get it. I am also with my fiction I follow the muse a lot more but I have lots of things in my business where I do look at the bottom line and what you say you want mostly in my non-fiction area. So yes then Willow talks about pivoting into new products so signed paperbacks subscription boxes and Kickstarter for special editions and of course hiring a team. Now I think this is the main difference between six sixfig and multi6figure and seven figure businesses. If you want a sevenf figureure business of any kind in any niche, you need more people than just you. Even in these days of AI agents or whatever, you do need a team. Willow says she employs over a dozen people, including a social media team for posting and responding to comments. This also made me laugh because I was following someone on I think it was on X and they posted a video of behind the scenes of their social media and they I kid you not they had like a team of six people doing their social media and I was like well no wonder I can't compete. I can't compete with people who have teams of social media people and I don't want to. And that's part of why I pulled away from social media and I focus a lot more on long form content like podcasting. But of course, you do you. But yes, Willow has a warehouse as well, which while she doesn't work in the warehouse, obviously requires overhead to pay the bills. So when someone says they run a seven figure business, that doesn't necessarily mean a seven figure profit. If you employ over a dozen people and run a warehouse, that is a significant cost base every month. So this would be my other question for people which is what do you really want? Because people say oh I want a seven figure business. I'm like really do you want to have a type of business where you need to employ people? Do you want the pressure of bringing in that much money year on year? Because some people do have a one-off seven figure year. Maybe they have a book deal or something hits very hard. But to have a sevenf figureure business year on year and pay payroll year on year, you have to run quite a different kind of business. So Willow shares some statistics. 55% of her income is paperback and 84% from Shopify. So she really is what selling wide. She says the shift from solo author to business owner required thinking differently about investment and growth. Every hire, every new product line, every piece of equipment like the UV printer and binding machine we purchased for creating special editions in our garage was a calculated risk based on reader demand and profit margins. Then there are some key takeaways and I think this is where this article is useful. Whatever you want to do with your author business, whether you want four or five figures or six or seven. So, first of all, your backlist is valuable. You don't need to write constantly to have a thriving business. I have over 60 books published. This is from Willow. And finding new ways to package and present them to readers has been more profitable than churning out new releases. So, first of all, 60 books is a lot. So, if you only have say six books, then that's going to be a very different situation or one book. So, you do need a backlist. But as Willow says here, repackaging them and presenting them to readers in different ways is profitable. And bundling is a really big deal with selling direct, whether that's Kickstarter or Shopify or other different ways you can say, "Okay, this is a limited edition bundle. " So, for example, with my next Kickstarter for Bones of the Deep, I will be doing a special edition bundle, and that will include all the foiled editions with Death Valley, with Blood Vintage, with all the standalone books that I've done foiled editions of that will be signed that you can't get usually. So, you doing these kind of bundles are really good ways to do it. Also listen to what readers really want. Not what the market says they want, but what your specific readers tell you. Now, that can obviously be through surveys, that can be through reviews, that could just be through evidence of sales and reviews. So, yeah, listen to what readers actually want and serve those readers. Also on social media, organic marketing can replace ad spend, but it requires serious commitment, multiple posts per day, consistent engagement, and building genuine relationships with your audience. So, if you're like, "Oh, social media isn't working for me. " Well, I hear you. That's why I don't do it because it wasn't working for me either. And also, I don't enjoy it. So if you want to do organic marketing is essentially you're not paying with your money but you're paying with your time. So this podcasting is a form of organic marketing. I'm not paying you to listen to me but some of you do listen. buy my books or are patrons or join my webinars that kind of thing. So, organic marketing can replace ad spend, but you have to be committed to it with your time or your team's time as Willow has a team. Also, diversification creates stability. Multiple revenue streams means you're not at the mercy of algorithm changes, platform policy shifts, or market saturation in any single area. If one revenue stream slows down, others continue. Totally agree with that. Something I've always preached. That's nothing new on this show. And also think like a business owner, not just a writer. And invest in your systems, your infrastructure, and your team. Track data. Make decisions based on what's actually working, not what you wish would work. So much of being an author is wishful thinking. I reckon also understanding profit margins and cash flow. Yes, you need business skills as well as creative skills. Now, the data tracking, I've mentioned many times before that I'm not particularly good with spreadsheets and all that kind of thing, but this is where AI is now a superpower. So, I just download all the data and I upload it into Claude. You can use Chat GBT, you can use Gemini, whatever you want to use and get it to analyze the data, which is super useful. And remember, with the AI tools, it is worth paying for a subscription cuz you get better models. My favorite model right now is Claude Opus 4. 6. to six. And you must be using a thinking model if you want any kind of analysis. If you're in my Patreon, you'll know all of this as I go through this and recently shared how I made Claude my co-CEO with data analysis month on month and keeping me on track in my business, which is super useful. So, I wanted to bring this article up as it will hopefully be inspirational for some of you. Some of you will hear it as encouragement and a call to do better and write more and experiment and grow your income and your business. And others will shake their head and go, "No way. I do not want to do all of that. " And of course, you don't have to do all ### Simplify Your Author Business [21:32] of that. I faced this and I I've talked about this on the show a number of times, but there have been several times over the years when I've thought, I really want to hit seven figures. I've been now making sort of multi6 figures for over a decade. Year in year out, I make around the same amount of money. Now, having a sustainable business where you make the same amount of money is fantastic. If you want to grow your business, you have to do things differently. But I want to run more of a sustainable business for me and my life. I'm not somebody who wants to have a big team. I definitely don't want to have a warehouse. go back and listen to the interview with Sasha Black which was just before Christmas. If you are interested in running a warehouse, have a listen to that because I think either you really do want to or you definitely don't want to. And I'm in the don't want to camp. But if you want to make seven figures, then you need to think about how to reach that. And it's definitely not just by grinding out. You can obviously get a significant book deal or maybe movie rights, but that is very different to year in year out a business that supports multiple employees. So, yeah, I think it's very interesting to consider what kind of business you want to run. I love having multiple streams of income. I don't make a full-time living from fiction. I have my patrons. I have this show. I have webinars. I have non-fiction. So you don't have to do a Willow Winters, but whatever you do, make deliberate choices about your author business because my talk at the Indie Author Lab at London Bookf Fair was on simplifying because just because we can do everything now, we don't have to. And in fact, trying to do everything is a recipe for burnout. So, I'm trying to encourage people, including myself, to simplify, question whether you want to focus on every format, every platform, every marketing angle, and take more time to enjoy the creative side, and to walk out in nature and do all the things you enjoy doing. Because why do you want a seven figure business? Is it to do more things that you enjoy, spend more time with your family, all the things you think you will do once you achieve whatever the goal is? Well, the other alternative is just to do that now and make less money. So, don't make being an author into a job you hate. And if you feel that way, if you feel like, oh, I just don't like doing those things, then find a way to change it. If you can write for love and not money, then do it. ### Listener Photos and Community [24:04] So, thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week. Melissa on X sent me some pictures out walking on my lunch break in Hampton, VA. Oh, I want to say that's Virginia. I like guessing at my USA states. And stopped by my local Episcopal church, founded in 1610. Here are some pictures of the grave markers from the 1800s. Lovely. And Richard emailed during a warm pre-pring day. Lovely wintry blue sky. Came upon a cemetery nestled between two roads in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I thought it was filled with recent burials. Turns out St. Peter's Catholic Cemetery was established in 1855. So there are many old headstones, part of St. Peter's Parish. Fantastic. Lovely to see that. And Catherine sent a really awesome picture of a castle on this high stone cliff. Just very cool and atmospheric. It is Berg Alpenstein in Mitcheldorf in Obero strike which is very cool. So that is on the east side of the valley and is a church on top of the hill apparently where the lay lines converge on the eastern edge of the high Alps and the Austrian Lake District. Looks fantastic. I just love it. I love living in Europe. And I said this to an American. Yes, we do know we live in a museum. We literally And it's very cool. I mean, I live in Bath, but we have a 2,000-year-old Roman Baths and we have all the Jane Austin and all the Bridgettony Regency stuff and it's just wonderful. So, yes, we do know we live in a museum. So, please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creativepen. com or on the YouTube channel. You can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or crypt or churchyard. Joanna atthecreativepen. com. I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. ### Patreon Sponsor and Extras [26:08] So today's show is sponsored by my community at patreon. com/thecreative pen. Thanks to the nine new patrons who've joined over the last week and thanks to everyone who has been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio on writing craft author business and AI tutorials. Last week, I shared how I work with AI tools like MidJourney, along with my human book cover designer, Jane. How we did the cover for Bones of the Deep, how the process works from my initial ideas through to Jane's design, and also how to do custom end papers and marketing images. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So, if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon. com p a t r e o n. com/ the creative pen. Right, let's get into ### Believe Care Invest Trifecta [27:05] the tips. One, master the believe, care, invest trifecta. When I spoke with Matt Bird on episode 624, he laid out the three things you need to achieve on the very first page of your book or in the first 10 minutes of a film. He calls it believe, care, and invest. First, the reader must believe the character is a real person, somehow proving they are not a cardboard imitation of a human being, not just a generic type walking through a generic plot. Second, the reader must care about the character's circumstances. And third, the reader must invest in the character's ability to solve the story's central problem. Matt used the Hunger Games as his primary example, and it's brilliant. On the very first page, we believe Katniss's voice. Suzanne Collins writes in first person with a staccato rhythm, lots of periods, short declarative sentences that immediately grounds us in a survivalist mentality. We care because Katniss is starving. She's protecting her little sister. And we invest because she is out there ball hunting, which Matt pointed out is one of the most badass things a character can do. She even kills a lynx two pages in and sells the pelt. We invest in her resourcefulness and grit before the plot has even begun. Matt was very clear that this has nothing to do with the character being likable. He said his subtitle writing a hero anyone will love doesn't mean the character has to be a good person. He described hero as both genderneutral and morally neutral. A hero can be totally evil or totally good. What matters is that we believe, care, and invest. He demonstrated this beautifully by breaking down the first 10 minutes of We Crashed, where the characters of Adam and Rebecca Noman are absolutely not likable, but we are completely hooked. Adam steals his neighbors Chinese food through a carefully orchestrated con involving an imaginary beer. It's not admirable behavior, but the trade craft involved, as Matt put it, using a term from spy movies, makes us invest in him. We see a character trying to solve the big problem of his life, which is that he's poor and wants to be rich and we want to see if he can pull it off. Actionable step. Go to the first page of your current work in progress. Does it achieve all three? Does the reader believe this is a real person with a distinctive voice? Do they care about the character's circumstances? And do they invest in the character's ability to handle what's coming? If even one of those three is missing, that's your revision priority. ### Define the Dramatic Question [30:11] Two, define the dramatic question. Who are they really? Will Store, author of The Science of Storytelling, came on episode 490 and gave one of the most powerful frameworks I've ever heard for character-driven fiction. He explained that the human brain evolved language primarily to swap social information. In other words, to gossip. We are wired to monitor other people, to ask the question, who is this person when the chips are down? That's what Will calls the dramatic question, and it's what he believes lies at the heart of all compelling storytelling. It's not a question about plot. It's a question about the character's soul. And every scene in your novel should force the character to answer it. His example of Lawrence of Arabia is unforgettable. The dramatic question for the entire film is, "Who are you, Lawrence? Are you ordinary or are you extraordinary? " At the beginning, Lawrence is a cocky, rebellious young soldier who believes his rebelliousness makes him superior. Every iconic scene in that 3-hour film tests that belief. Sometimes Lawrence acts as though he truly is extraordinary, leading the Arabs into battle, being hailed as a god. And sometimes the world strips him bare, and he sees himself as ordinary. Because it's a tragedy, he never overcomes his flaw. He doubles down on his belief that he's extraordinary until he becomes monstrous, culminating in that iconic scene where he lifts a bloody dagger and sees his own reflection with horror. Will also use Jaws to demonstrate how this works in a pure action thriller. Brody's dramatic question is simple. Are you going to be old Broady who is terrified of the water or new Broady who can overcome that fear? Every scene where the shark appears is really asking that question. And the last moment of the film isn't the shark blowing up. It's Brody swimming back through the water saying he used to be scared of the water and he can't imagine why. Actionable step. Write down the dramatic question for your protagonist in a single sentence. Is it are you ordinary or extraordinary or are you brave enough to love again or will you sacrifice your principles for survival? If you can't answer this with specificity, your character might still be a sketch rather than a person. ### Specific Flaws Build Depth [33:00] Three, get rid of vague flaws and use absolute specificity. This was one of Will's most important points. He said that vague thinking about characters is really the enemy. When he teaches workshops and asks writers to describe their characters flaw, most of them say something like, "They're very controlling. " And Will's response is, "That's not good enough. Everyone is controlling. How are they controlling? What's the specific mechanism? " He gave the example of a profile he read of Theresa May during the UK's Brexit chaos. Someone who knew her said that Terresa May's problem was that she always thinks she's the only adult in every room she goes into. Will said that stopped him in his tracks because it's so precise. If you define a character with that level of specificity, you can take them and put them in any genre, any situation, a spaceship, a Victorian drawing room, a school playground, and you will know exactly how they're going to behave. The same applies to Arthur Miller's Willie Lman in Death of a Salesman as Will described it. A man who believes absolutely in capitalistic success and the idea that when you die you're going to be weighed on a scale just as God weighs you for sin, but now you're weighed for success. That's not a vague flaw. That's a worldview you can drop into any story and watch it combust. Will made another counterintuitive point that I found really valuable. Writers often think that piling on multiple traits will create a complex character, but the opposite is true. Starting with one highly specific flaw and running it through the demands of a relentless plot is what generates complexity. You end up with a far more nuanced original character than if you'd started with a laundry list of vague attributes. Actionable step. Take your protagonist's flaw and pressure test it. Is it specific enough that you could place this character in any situation and predict their behavior? If you're stuck at she's stubborn or he's insecure, keep pushing. What kind of stubborn? What kind of insecure? Find the diagnostic sentence. The Theresa May level of precision. ### Heroine Journey Connection [35:29] Four. Understand the heroine's journey. Strength through connection. Al Carrager came on episode 550 to discuss her non-fiction book, The Heroine's Journey, and it completely reframed how I think about some of my own fiction. Gail explained that the core difference between the hero's journey and the heroine's journey comes down to how strength and victory are defined. The hero's journey is about strength through solo action. The hero must be continually isolated to get stronger. He goes out of civilization, faces strife alone, and achieves victory through physical prowess and self-actualization. The heroine's journey is the opposite. The heroine achieves her goals by activating a network. She's a delegator, a general. She identifies where she can't do something alone, finds the people who can help, and portions out the work for mutual gain. Gail put it simply, "The heroine is very good at asking for help, which our culture tends to devalue, but which is actually a powerful form of strength. " Crucially, Gail stressed that gender is irrelevant to which journey you're writing. Her go-to examples are striking. The recent Wonder Woman film is practically a beat forbeat hero's journey. Gilgamesh oncreen as Gail described it. Meanwhile, Harry Potter, both the first book and the series as a whole, is a classic heroine's journey. Harry's power comes from his network, Dumbledore's army, the Order of the Phoenix, his friendships with Ron and Hermione. He doesn't defeat Voldemort alone. He defeats Voldemort because of love and connection. This distinction has real practical consequences for writers. If you're writing a hero's journey and you hit writer's block, Gail said, the solution is usually to isolate your hero further and pile on more strife. But if you're writing a heroine's journey, the solution is probably to throw a new character into the scene. Someone who has advice to offer or a skill the heroine lacks. The actual solutions to writer's block are different depending on which narrative you're writing. As I reflected on my own work, I realized that my arcane thriller protagonist, Morgan Sierra, follows a hero's journey. ### Choose Hero or Heroine [38:05] She's a solo operative, a lone wolf like Jack Reacher or James Bond. But my Mapwalker fantasy series follows a heroine's journey with Sienna and her group of friends working together. I hadn't consciously chosen those paths. The stories led me there. But understanding the framework helps me write more intentionally now. Actionable step. Identify which journey your protagonist is on. Does your character gain strength by being alone hero or by building connections. Heroine. This will inform every plot decision you make. From how they face obstacles to how your story ends. ### Metaphor Families Voice [38:51] Five, use metaphor families to anchor dialogue and voice. One of the most practical techniques Matt Bird shared on episode 624 is the idea of assigning each character a metaphor family. A specific well of language that they draw from. This gives each character a distinctive voice that goes beyond accent or dialect. Matt explained how in The Wire, one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, every character has a different metaphor family. What struck him was that Omar, this iconic character, never utters a single curse word in the entire series. His metaphor family is pirate. He talks about parlays, uses language that feels like it belongs in Pirates of the Caribbean, and it creates this incredible ironic counterpoint against his urban setting. It tells us immediately that this is a character who sees himself in a tradition of people that doesn't match his immediate surroundings. Matt also referenced the UK version of The Office where Gareth works at a paper company but aspires to the military. So all of his language is drawn from a military metaphor family. He doesn't talk about filing and photocopying. He talks about tactics and discipline and being on the front line. This tells us that the character has a life and dreams beyond the immediate scene. And it's the gap between aspiration and reality that makes him both funny and believable. He pointed out that a metaphor family sometimes comes from a character's background, but it's often more interesting when it comes from their aspirations. What does your character want to be? What world do they fantasize about inhabiting? That's where their language should come from. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a spiritual hermit, but his metaphor family is military. He uses the language of generals and commanders, and that ironic counterpoint is part of what makes him feel so rich. Actionable step. Assign each of your main characters a metaphor family. It could be based on their job, their background, or more interestingly, their secret aspirations. Then go through your dialogue and make sure each character is consistently drawing from that well of language. If two characters sound the same when you strip away the dialogue tags, this is the fix. Six, find the diagnostic detail, the ### Diagonal Toast Details [41:38] diagonal toast. Avoid cliched character tags, the random scar, the eye patch, the mysterious limp, unless they serve a deep narrative purpose. Matt Bird on episode 624 was very funny about this. He pointed out that Nick Fury, Odin, and eventually Thor all have eye patches in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Eye patches are done, he said. You cannot do eye patches anymore. Instead, look for what I'm calling the diagonal toast detail after a scene Matt described from Captain Marvel. In the film, Captain Marvel is trying to determine whether Nick Fury is who he says he is. She asks him to prove he isn't a shape-shifting alien. Fury shares biographical details, his history, his mother. But then she pushes further and says, "Name one more thing you couldn't possibly have made up about yourself. " And Fury says, "If toast is cut diagonally, I can't eat it. " Matt said that detail is gold for a writer because it feels pulled from a real life. You can pull it from your own life and gift it to your characters and the reader can tell it's not manufactured. He gave another example from The Sopranos. Tony Soprano's mother won't answer the phone after dark. The show's creator, David Chase, confirmed on the DVD commentary that this came from his own mother, who genuinely would not answer the phone after dark and couldn't explain why. Matt's practical advice was to keep a journal. Write down the strange specific things that people do or say. Mine your own life for those hyperspecific details. You just need one per book. In my own writing, I've used this approach. In my arcane thrillers, my character Morgan Sierra has always been Angelina Jolie in my mind. Specifically, Jolie in Lara Croft or Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Blake Daniel in my crime thriller series was based on Jesse Williams from Gray's Anatomy. I paste pictures of actors into my Scrivener projects. It helps with visuals, but also with the sense of the character, their energy, and physicality. But visual details only take you so far. It's the behavioral quirks, the diagonal toast moments that make a character feel genuinely alive. That said, physical character tags can work brilliantly when they serve the story. As I discuss in how to write a novel, Robert Galbra's commer and strike is an amputee, and his pain and the physical challenges of his prosthesis are a key part of every story. It's not a cosmetic detail. It's woven into the action and the character's psychology. My character, Blake Daniel, always wears gloves to cover the scars on his hands, which provides an angle into his wounded past, as well as a visual cue for the reader. And of course, Harry Potter's lightningshaped scar isn't just a mark. It's a direct connection to his nemesis and the mythology of the entire series. The rule of thumb is if the tag tells us something about the character's interior life or connects to the plot, it's earning its place. If it's just there to make the character visually distinctive, it's probably a crutch. Game of Thrones takes character tags further with the family houses, each with their own mottos and sigils. The Starks say winter is coming, and their sigil is a dire wolf. Those aren't just labels. They're world view made visible. Actionable step. Start a diagonal toast notebook. Every time you notice something strange and specific about someone's behavior, something that feels too real to be made up, write it down. Then gift it to a character who needs more texture. ### Displace Trauma Into Fiction [45:52] Seven, displace your own trauma into the work. Barbara Nicholas shared something deeply personal on episode 732 that fundamentally changed how I think about putting pain onto the page. While starting at first light, the first book in her Dr. Evan Wilding series, she lost her son to epilepsy, something called sudden unexplained death in epilepsy. One day he was there and the next day he was gone. Barbara said that writing helped her cope with the trauma, that doing a deep dive into old English literature and the Viking age for the book's research became a lifeline. But here's what's important. She didn't give Dr. Evan Wilding her exact trauma. Evan Wilding is 4' 5 in. And Barbara described how he has to walk through a world that won't adjust to him. That's its own form of learning to cope when circumstances are beyond your control. She displaced her genuine grief into the character's different but parallel struggle. When I asked her about the difference between writing for therapy and writing for an audience, she drew on her experience teaching creative writing to veterans through a collaboration between the US Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts. She said she's found that she can pour her heartache into her characters and process it through them, even when writing professionally, and that the genuine emotion is what touches readers. We've all been through our own losses and griefs, so seeing how a character copes can be deeply meaningful. I've always found that putting my own pain onto the page is the most direct way to connect with a reader's soul. My character Morgan Sierra's musings on religion and the supernatural are often my own. Her restlessness, her fascination with the darker edges of faith, those come from me. But her Krav Magar fighting skills and her ability to kill the bad guys are definitely her own. That gap between what's mine and what's hers is where the fiction lives. Barbara also said something on that episode that I wrote down and stuck on my wall. She said, "The act of producing itself is a balm to the soul. I've been thinking about that ever since. On my own wall, I have measure your life by what you create. " Different words, same truth. Actionable step. If you're carrying something heavy, grief, anger, fear, regret, consider how you might displace it into a character's different but emotionally parallel struggle. Don't copy your exact situation. Transform it. The emotion will be genuine and the reader will feel it. ### Write Diverse Characters [48:52] Eight, write diverse characters as real people. When I spoke with Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer on episode 673, Sarah is Chau and a historical fiction author honored by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. She offered a perspective that every fiction writer needs to hear. The key message was to move away from stereotypes. Don't write your American Indian character as the wise guide who exists solely to dispense mystic wisdom to the white protagonist. Don't limit diverse characters to historical settings as though they only exist in the past. Place them in normal contemporary roles. Your spaceship captain, your forensic scientist, your small town baker. Any of them can be American Indian or Nigerian or Japanese and their heritage should be a livedin part of their identity, not the sole reason they exist in the story. I write international thrillers and dark fantasy, and my fiction is populated with characters from all over the world. I have a multicultural family, and I've lived in many places and traveled widely. So, I've met, worked with, and had relationships with people from different cultures. I find story ideas through travel. And if I set my books in a certain place, then the story is naturally populated with the people who live there. As I discuss in my book, How to Write a Novel, the world is a diverse place. So, your fiction needs to be populated with all kinds of people. If I only populated my fiction with characters like me, they would be boring novels. There are many dimensions of difference. Race, nationality, sex, age, body type, ability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, class, culture, education level. And even then, don't assume that similar types of people think the same way. Some authors worry they will make mistakes. We live in a time of outrage and some authors have been criticized for writing outside their own experience. So, is it too dangerous to try? Of course not. The media amplifies outliers and most authors include diverse characters in every book without causing offense because they work hard to get it right. It's about awareness, research, and intent. actionable step. Audit the cost of your current work in progress. Have you written a monocultural perspective for all of them? If so, consider who could bring a different background, perspective, or set of cultural specifics to the story, not as a token addition, but as a real person with a real life. Nine. ### Cultural Specificity Research [51:53] Nine. Respect tribal and cultural specificity. Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer on episode 673 was emphatic about one thing. Never treat diverse groups as monolithic. If you're writing a Native American character, you must research the specific nation. Chau is not Navajo just as British is not French. Sarah described the distinct cultural markers of the Chau people. the diamond pattern you'll see on traditional shirts and dresses which represents the diamondback rattlesnake. They have distinct dances and songs. She said that if she saw someone in traditional dress at a distance, she would know whether they were chocked or based on what they were wearing. She encouraged writers who want to write specifically about a nation to get to know those people. go to events, go to a pow-wow, learn about the individual culture. She noted that a big misconception is that American Indians exist only in the past. She stressed that they are still here, still living their cultures, and fiction should reflect that present reality. I took a similar approach when writing Destroyer of Worlds, which is set mostly in India. I read books about Hindu myth, watched documentaries about the Sardus, and had one of my Indian readers from Mumbai check my cultural references. For Risen Gods, set in New Zealand with a young Maui protagonist. I studied books about Maui mythology and fiction by Maui authors and had a male Maui reader check for cultural issues. Research is simply an act of empathy. The practical takeaway is this. If you're going to include a character from a specific cultural background, do the work. Use specific cultural details rather than generic signifiers. Sarah talked about how even she fell into stereotypes when she was first writing until her mother pointed them out. If someone from within a culture can fall into those traps, the rest of us certainly can. Do the research. Try your best. Ask for help and apologize if you need to. Actionable step. If you're writing a character from a specific culture, identify three to five sensory or behavioral details that are particular to that culture. Not the generic version, but the real researched, livedin version. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader from that community to check your work. ### Morally Neutral Protagonists [54:35] 10. Give your protagonist a morally neutral hero status. Matt Bird was clear about this on episode 624. The word hero simply means the protagonist, the person we follow through the story. It's a functional role, not a moral label. We don't have to like them. We don't even have to root for their goals in a moral sense. We just have to find them compelling enough to invest our attention in their problem solving. Think of Succession, where every member of the Roy family is varying degrees of awful and yet the show was utterly compelling. Or We Crashed, where Adam Noyman is a narcissistic con artist, but we can't look away because he's trying to solve the enormous problem of building an empire from nothing. And the trade craft he employs is fascinating. As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, readers must want to spend time with your characters. They don't have to be lovable or even likable. That will depend on your genre and story choices. But they have to be captivating enough that we want to spend time with them. A character who is trying to solve a massive problem will naturally draw investment from the audience even if we wouldn't want to have tea with them. Will store extended this idea by pointing out that the audience will actually root for a character to solve their problem even if the audience doesn't actually want the character's goal to be achieved in the real world. We don't really want more billionaires, but we invested in Adam Noyman's rise because that was the problem the story posed. And our brains are wired to invest in problem solving. This connects to something deeper. What does your character want and why? As I explore in How to Write a Novel, desire operates on multiple levels. Take a character like Phil who joins the military during wartime. On the surface, she wants to serve her country, but she also wants to escape her deadend town and learn new skills. Deeper still, her father and grandfather served, and by joining up, she hopes to finally earn their respect. And perhaps deepest of all, her father died on a mission under mysterious circumstances, and she wants to find out what happened from the inside. That layering of motivation is what turns a flat character into a three-dimensional one. The audience doesn't need to be told all of this explicitly. It can emerge through action, dialogue, and the choices the character makes under pressure. But you, the writer, need to know it. You need to know what your character really wants deep down because that desire more than any external plot device is what drives the story forward. And your antagonist needs the same depth. They also want something often diametrically opposed to your protagonist and they need a reason that makes sense to them. In my arcane thriller Tree of Life, my antagonist is the ays of a Brazilian mining empire who wants to restore the earth to its original state to atone for the destruction caused by her father's company. She's part of a radical ecological group who believe the only way to restore nature is to end all human life. It's extreme, but in an era of climate change, it's a motivation readers can understand. Even if they disagree with the solution, actionable step. If you're struggling to make a morally gray character work, make sure their problem is big enough and their methods are specific and interesting enough that we invest in the how, even if we're ambivalent about the what. ### Vibrant Side Characters [58:42] 11. Build vibrant side characters. Gail Carrager made a point on episode 550 that was equal parts craft advice and business strategy. In a heroine's journey model, side characters aren't just foder to be killed off to motivate the hero. They form a network, and because you don't have to kill them, unlike in a hero's journey, where allies are often betrayed or removed, so the hero can be further isolated, you can pick up those side characters and give them their own books. Gail said this creates a really voracious reader base. You write one series with vivid side characters and then readers fall in love with those side characters and want their stories. So you write spin-offs. The romance genre does this brilliantly. Think of the Bridgetton books where each sibling gets their own novel. The side character in one book becomes the protagonist in the next. Barbara Nicholas experienced this firsthand with her Dr. Evan Wilding series. She has River Wilding, Evan's adventurous brother, and Diana, the axe throwing research assistant. And her editor has already expressed interest in a spin-off series with those characters. Barbara described creating characters she wants to spend time with, or characters who give her nightmares, but also intrigue her. That's the dual test. Are they interesting enough for you to write and interesting enough for readers to demand more? As I wrote in how to write a novel, characters that span series can deepen the reader's relationship with them as you expand their backstory into new plots. Readers will remember the character more than the plot or the book title and look forward to the next installment because they want more time with those people. British crime author Angela Marson's described it as readers feeling like returning to her characters is like putting on a pair of old slippers. Actionable step. Look at your supporting cast. Is there a side character who is vivid enough to carry their own story? If not, what could you add? A specific hobby, a distinct voice, a compelling backstory that would make readers want more of them? ### Voice Rhythm Mechanics [1:01:10] 12. Use voice as a rhythmic tool. Voice is one of the most important elements of novel writing and Matt Bird helped me think about it in a technical mechanical way that I found really useful. He pointed out that the ratio of periods to commas defines a character's internal reality. A staccato rhythm, lots of periods, short sentences, suggests a character who is certain, grounded, or perhaps survivalist and traumatized. Katniss in The Hunger Games has a periodheavy voice. She's in survival mode. She doesn't have time for complexity or qualification. A flowing, comma-heavy style suggests someone more academic, more nuanced, or possibly more scattered and manipulative. The character who qualifies everything, who adds sub clauses and digressions, is a different kind of person from the character who speaks in declarations. This is something you can actually measure. Pull up a passage of your character's dialogue or internal monologue and count the periods versus the commas. If the rhythm doesn't match who the character is supposed to be, you found a mismatch you can fix. Sentence length is the heartbeat of your character's persona, and voice extends beyond rhythm to the words themselves. As I discussed in the metaphor family's tip, each character should draw from a distinctive well of language. But voice also encompasses their relationship to silence. Some characters talk around the thing they mean, others say it straight. Some are self-deprecating, others are blunt to the point of rudeness. All of these choices are character choices, not just style choices. I find it useful to read my dialogue aloud and not just to check for naturalness, but to hear whether each character sounds distinct. If you could swap dialogue lines between two characters and nobody would notice, you have a voice problem. One practical test. Cover the dialogue tags and see if you can tell who's speaking from the words alone. Actionable step. Choose a key passage from your protagonist's point of view and read it aloud. Does the rhythm match the character? A soldier under fire should not sound like a philosophy professor at a wine tasting. Adjust the ratio of periods to commas until the voice feels right. ### Character Plot Interlock [1:03:53] 13. Link, character, and plot until they're inseparable. Will Store made the case on episode 490 that the number one problem he sees in the writing he encounters in workshops, in submissions, even in published books, is that the characters and the plots are unconnected. There's a story happening and there are people in it, but the story isn't a product of who those people are. He said a story should be like life in our lives. The plots are intimately connected to who we are as characters. The goals we pursue, the obstacles we face, the same problems that keep recurring, these are products of our personalities, our flaws, our specific ways of being in the world. His framework is that your plot should be designed specifically to plot against your character. You've got a character with a particular floor. The plot exists to test that floor over and over until the character either transforms or doubles down and explodes. Jaws is the perfect example. Brody is afraid of water. A shark shows up in the coastal town he's responsible for protecting. The entire plot is engineered to force him to confront the one thing he cannot face. Will pointed out that the whole plot of Jaws is structured around Brody's floor. It begins with the shark arriving. The midpoint is when Brody finally gets the courage to go into the water. And the very final scene isn't the shark blowing up. It's Brody swimming back through the water. Even a film that's 98% action is at its core structured around a character with a character flaw. This is the standard I aspire to in my own work. Even in my actionheavy thrillers, the external plot should be a mirror of the internal struggle. When those two are aligned, the story becomes irresistible. Will also made an important point about series fiction, which is where most commercial authors live. I asked him how this works when your character can't be transformed at the end of every book because there has to be a next book. His answer was elegant. You don't cure them. Episodic TV characters like Fleag or David Brent or Basil Faulty never truly change. And the fact that they don't change is actually the source of the comedy. But every episode throws a new story event at them that tests and exposes their flaw. You just keep throwing story events at them again and again. That's a soap opera, a sitcom, and a book series. As I wrote in How to Write a Novel, character flaws are aspects of personality that affect the person so much that facing and overcoming them become central to the plot. in Jaws. The protagonist, Brody, is afraid of the water, but he has to overcome that flaw to destroy the killer shark and save the town. But remember, your characters should feel like real people. So, never define them purely by their flaws. The character addicted to painkillers might also be a brilliant and successful female lawyer who gets up at 4 in the morning to work out at the gym, likes 80s music, and volunteers at the local dog shelter at weekends. Character wounds are different from flaws. They're formed from life experience and are part of your character's backstory. traumatic events that happened before the events of your novel, but shape the character's reactions in the present. In my arcane thrillers, Morgan Sierra's husband, Ellen, died in her arms during a military operation. This happened before the series begins, but her memories of it recur when she faces a firefight, and she struggles to find happiness again for fear of losing someone she loves once more. And then there's the perennial advice. Show don't tell. Most writers have heard this so many times that it's easy to nod and then promptly write scenes that tell rather than show. Basically, you need to reveal your character through action and dialogue rather than explanation. In my thriller, Day of the Vikings, Morgan Sierra fights a neoiking in the halls of the British Museum and brings him down with Krav Magar. That fight scene isn't just about showing action. It opens up questions about her backstory, demonstrates character, and moves the plot forward. Telling would be something like Morgan was an expert in Krav Magar. showing is the reader discovering it through the scene itself. Actionable step. Look at the main plot events of your novel. For each major turning point, ask, "Does this scene specifically test my protagonist's flaw? If not, can you redesign the scene so that it does? " The tighter the connection between character and plot, the more powerful the story. ### Maestra Discovery Writing [1:09:22] 14. The Maestra approach. write out of order. If you're a discovery writer like me, you may feel like the deep character work I've been describing sounds more suited to plotters. But Barbara Nicholas gave me a beautiful metaphor on episode 732 that reframes it entirely. Barbara described her evolving writing process as being like a maestra standing in front of an orchestra. Sometimes you bring in the horns, a certain theme, and strings, a certain character, and sometimes you turn to the soloist. It's a more organic and jumping around process than linear writing. And Barbara said she's only recently given herself permission to work this way. When I told her that I use Scriber to write in scenes out of order and then drag and drop them into a structure later, she was genuinely intrigued. And this is how I've always worked. I'll see the story in my mind like a movie trailer. Flashes of the big emotional scenes, the pivotal confrontations, the moments of revelation, and I write those first. I don't know how they hang together until quite late in the process. Then I'll move scenes around, print the whole thing out, and figure out the connective tissue. The point is that discovery writers can absolutely build deep characters. Sometimes writing the big emotional scenes first is how you discover who the character is before you fill in the rest. You don't need a 20page character worksheet or a 200page outline like Jeffrey Diva. You need to be willing to follow the character into the unknown and trust that the structure will emerge. As Barbara said, she writes to know what she's thinking. That's the discovery writer's credo. And I would add, I write to know who my characters are. Actionable step. If you're stuck on your current chapter, skip it. Write the scene that's burning in your imagination, even if it's from the middle or the end. That scene might be the key to unlocking who your character really is. ### Research For Empathy [1:11:38] 15. Use research to help with empathy. Research shouldn't just be about factual accuracy. It's a tool for finding the sensory details that create empathy. Barbara Nicholas described research as almost an excuse to explore things that fascinate her, and I feel exactly the same way. I would go so far as to say that writing is an excuse for me to explore the things that interest me. Barbara and I both travel for our stories. For her Dr. Evan Wilding books. She did deep research into old English literature and the Viking age. For my thriller, End of Days, I transcribed hours of video from Appalachian snake handling churches on YouTube to understand the world view of the worshippers because my antagonist was brought up in that tradition. I couldn't just make that up. I had to hear their language, feel their conviction, understand why they would hold venomous serpents as an act of faith. Barbara also mentioned getting to Israel and the West Bank for research, and I've been to both places, too. Finding that one specific sensory detail, the smell of a particular location, the specific way an expert handles a tool, the sound of a particular kind of music makes the character's life feel lived in. It's the difference between a character who is described as living in a place and a character who inhabits it. As I wrote in how to write a novel, don't write what you know, write what you want to learn about. I love research. It's part of why I'm an author in the first place. I take any excuse to dive into a world different from my own. Research using books, films, podcasts, and travel. And focus particularly on sources produced by people from the world view you want to understand. Actionable step for your next piece of character research. Go beyond reading. Watch a documentary, visit a location, talk to someone who lives the experience. Find one sensory detail, a smell, a sound, a texture that you couldn't have invented. That detail will make your character feel real. Bonus. ### Final Takeaways And Wrap [1:14:03] Measure your life by what you create. In an age of AI and a tsunami of content, your ultimate brand protection is the quality of your human creation. Barbara Nicholas said that the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul. And I believe that with every fiber of my being, don't be afraid to take that step back like I did with my deadlifting. Take the time to master these deeper craft skills. It might feel like you're slowing down or going backwards by not chasing the latest marketing trend, but it's the only way to step forward into a sustainable, highquality career. Your characters are your signature. No AI can replicate the specificity of your lived experience, the emotional truth of your displaced trauma, or the sensory details you've gathered from a life of curiosity and travel. Those are yours. Pour them into your characters, and they will resonate for years to come. Actionable takeaway. Identify the dramatic question for your current protagonist. Can you state it in a single sentence with the kind of specificity Will Store described? Is it as clear as are you ordinary or extraordinary? Or are you the only adult in the room? If you can't answer it with that kind of precision, your character might still be a sketch. Give them a diagonal toast moment today. Find the one hyperspecific detail that proves they are not an imitation of life. And then ask yourself, does your plot test your character's flaw in every major scene? If you can align those two things, a precisely defined character and a plot that exists to test them, you will have a story that readers cannot put down. So, I hope you found this episode useful today and maybe you'll also go back and listen to the individual episodes mentioned to delve deeper into the topics. You can always find the links in the show notes or on the creativepen. com/mpodcast the feeds the like if you're listening whatever you're listening on you may only have a couple of hundred active episodes but they are all on my website and you can always go and download the episode or read the transcript or have a listen. So yes thecreativepen. com/mpodcast and if you're interested in how I created this episode. So initially I used notebookm based on the YouTube videos of the episodes from youtube. com/thecreativepen plus I included my text chapters on character from my book how to write a novel. Now notebookm only uses your source material that you select. So it's a lot more exact than other ways of writing with LLMs. So, Notebook LM created a blog post from the initial material and then I expanded it and fact checked it with Claude 4. 6 Opus and edited it and then I used my voice clone at 11 Labs to narrate it. So, to be honest, it actually took more time than an interview. So, I will only do more if it's useful. But I really like the idea of raiding the backlist for nuggets of useful things because it surfaces interviews I had forgotten about. And we are heading towards 900 after all. So, let me know what you think or if you want me to do this kind of show on a topic that might be useful. An obvious one would be book marketing. I know I could definitely do that. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creativepen. com or on the YouTube channel or email me joanna@thecreatpen. com and send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday, back to interviews. I will be talking to the amazing Ann Lamont. Yes, author of Bird by Bird, which I know many of you will have read if you haven't. Bird by Bird is one of those books on writing you kind of have to read. It's in the cannon of writing books. She has a new book out with her husband, also a writer, Neil Allen, and it was a joy to talk to them both about good writing. So, in the meantime, happy writing, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes at the creativepen. com/mpodcast. And you can get your free author blueprint at thecreativepen. com/bloopprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook at JF Pen Author. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.